Accidental Crab Cakes

The crab fishery has been declared a disaster in the Chesapeake Bay and crab is hardly seasonal this time of year. But most catering clients don't give a lick about sustainability or seasonality. Hence, it's possible to end up with a leftover pound of crab meat in the fridge, probably from someplace in Southeast Asia purchased at Costco.

What to do?

In our case, there was no choice but to invite friends over for my wife's superb crab cakes. I could not think of any way to turn this into a winter menu, we just followed our best instincts and made some of our favorite three-hour braised green beans and the cheese grits we've been focused on this week.

The final menu looked like this

Salad

Tender Greens w/ Honeycrips Apple, Toasted Walnuts, Dried Cranberries

Entree

Crab Cakes w/ Tartar Sauce

Green Beans Braised w/ Tomato and Fennel Seed

Cheese Grits

Dessert

Sweet Potato Pie w/ Vanilla Whipped Cream

Naturally, I received a thorough thrashing from my wife for purchasing green beans in January. Oh, the ignomy of it all. Mea culpa.

The secret to successful crab cakes is to handle the meat as little as possible. In Crisfield, Maryland, for instance, once the world's crab picking capital, a crab cake likely as not will consist of a pile of choice lump meat barely breaded and placed under a broiler to brown. Most cook's ignore this tradition or are completely ignorant of it. That's why so many crabcakes you see in restaurants have the density and resiliency of a hockey puck that has spent too much time in a deep fryer.

My wife's method is to combine 1 pound of lump crab meat with 1/2 cup fresh bread crumbs--that usually means a couple of dinner rolls pulled into small pieces. Combine with 1 beaten egg, 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard, 1/2 teaspoon worcesterhire sauce, a tablespoon chopped parsely, a dash or two of Tabasco and salt and pepper to taste. Gently toss all the ingredients together and let the mixture sit in a bowl for an hour or more. This will help the cakes hold together in the cooking and give the flavors some time to meld.

Next, pour canola oil into a heavy skillet to a depth of about 1/2 inch and heat to medium high. Gently form the crab mixture into 4 jumbo puck shapes, or 5 or 6 large cakes. Place the crab cakes in the hot oil and brown on both sides, turning them gently with a slotted spatula. Remove the cakes to paper towels to drain, then arrange them on a baking sheet and place in a 300 degree oven for about 15 minutes to cook through.

For her tartar sauce, my wife mixes mayonnaise with a bit of finely chopped red onion, some chopped capers, pickle relish, a little juice from the pickle relish jar, and some Old Bay seasoning.

A lot of chefs claim to have secret methods for making crab cakes but this one is better than any other I've seen. The green beans, cooked to death, come to the plate dripping their magical, fennel-scented broth, which runs into the cheese grits to make a delicious muddle. We washed the whole thing down with a wonderful Vouvray wine.

Unless you happen to have a pound of crab meat in your refrigerator already, however, do give the crabs a break and wait until summer to enjoy this meal.

Building a Cocktail Buffet

When we put on a cocktail buffet, we go into production mode.


One of our go-to hors d'oeuvres is grilled shrimp. We use tail-on shrimp and apply a light drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, then a spice rub adjusted to the menu theme. Most of our rubs include a few basic spices--coarse salt, garlic salt, onion powder, brown sugar and usually chili powder. For a Southwestern theme, we would add cumin. Cinnamon and coriander would give the rub a North African tilt. For an Asian flavor, we use ginger and powdered lemon grass.

Line shrimp on a sheet pan, apply olive oil and dust with spice rub. Flip the shrimp and repeat the process.

For a small group, we would favor really large shrimp and place them on skewers so they don't curl. Otherwise, for larger groups, we lay the shrimp directly on the grill over very hot coals. Flip the shrimp once and look for some nice charring here and there. They only take a few short minutes to cook through. Remove them to a sheet pan to cool.


We served these Asian-style shrimp with a mayo dip seasoned with wasabi.


Miniature crab cakes also make an excellent hors d'oeuvres. We favor large pieces of crab meat in our crab cakes, not the kind where everything seems to have been run through a food processor to resemble cat food. The cakes are bound together with just a bit of egg, mayonnaise and bread crumbs.


If you have a crab cake recipe you like, all you have to do is reduce the size of the cakes from what you are used to. My wife likes a small mechanical scoop. It looks just like a miniature ice cream scoop. In fact, these scoops come in many different sizes.



Mix your usual ingredients in a bowl, then heat about 1/2-inch cooking oil at the bottom of a heavy skillet. Use both hands and the scoop to form the crab cake mix into small rounds. Place these in the hot oil with plenty of room around each, then flatten with a narrow off-set spatula. When the cakes have browned on one side, turn to the other side. The oil should be just hot enough to cook the crab cakes all the way through without burning. You will see the oil bubbling around each crab cake.




Remove the cakes to a baking sheet lined with paper towels. We served them with a Chesapeake-style tartar sauce, just a dollop on each crab cake.


We made two kinds of miniature sandwiches for the buffet using sweet potato biscuits. The sweet potatoes are first roasted in the oven, cooled, then incorporated into a traditional biscuit batter. My wife uses a small cookie cutter to form the biscuits. After they've baked and cooled, it's quite easy to open them into two halves and lay them out on the kitchen counter for assembly.




There were two different sandwiches on the menu: roasted turkey with a sage-infused mayonaise and cranberry sauce and a glazed ham with our own green tomato-apple chutney and maple mustard.



Once the biscuit pieces are lined up, we use a small spatula to spread the condiments, then lay down pieces of turkey or ham cut to size. Once the sandwiches are finally assembled, they can easily be stored in the refrigerator until you are ready to display them. They can even be made a day ahead. Just bring them up to room temperature before the guests arrive.


A suggestion for display: Try stacking the mini-sandwiches on decorative plates placed on a three-tier stand. This brings some drama and verticality to the buffet.

Besides being loaded with holiday flavors, the sandwiches--small and tidy as they are--also have a kind of tongue-in-cheek appeal. They make you want to giggle out loud.

Happy Birthday, Tomeika!

Yesterday we celebrated our friend Tomeika's twenty-seventh birthday and my wife spent the day making Tomeika's favorite foods so we could enjoy a lovely meal together on the terrace.


The menu: crab cakes, macaroni and cheese, braised kale with bacon, followed by a German chocolate cake.


German chocolate cake happens to be my favorite as well and I'm told our 7-year-old daughter helped in the baking. At a certain point, she was instructed that some of the eggs needed to be separated. Her solution to that request was to begin placing eggs in different parts of the kitchen: an egg on top of the microwave, an egg on the kitchen table, etc. It sounds to me like the eggs had plenty of separation...


At this point I need to interject that my wife makes probably the best crab cakes anywhere. For those of you who think crab cakes are something pounded out with lots of bread crumbs, then tossed in a deep fat fryer until the resemble something close to a horse turd, I have news.


My wife makes her crab cakes much more in the style of Maryland's Eastern Shore, where the large pieces of premium crab meat are just barely held together with a little mayo, a little mustard and a little fresh bread crumbs (not the stuff out of a can). At the Captain's Table in Crisfield, they are made in just this manner--more a tall pile of crab meat than anything--then finished under a broiler. Or at least they were the last time I was there years ago.


My wife prefers to fry her crab cakes in a heavy iron skillet until they are just browned on either side. And, yes, they do sometimes want to separate around the edges, there's just no helping that.


One of our favorite places to eat in the District of Columbia is The Diner in Adam's Morgan. I should amend that to say this is one of the places frequently haunted by my wife, my daughter and our friend Tomeika, often as a group. They particularly favor The Diner's macaroni and cheese and my wife was shooting for something approximating that, but wanted all you readers to know that the recipe she used came from Martha Stewart's website.

This is a dynamite macaroni and cheese, with both sharp cheddar and Gruyere cheeses in it and a wonderful crustiness owing to the bread crumbs my wife made fresh from a rustic loaf purchased at Whole Foods. After assembling the dish she poured it into one of our ceramic ovals and baked it earlier in the day. Then just prior to serving she placed it back in the oven to warm and develop that beautiful brown top. My wife used a round pastry cutter to place rounds of macaroni and cheese on the plates.

Finally, it turns out Tomeika is a big fan of greens. But greens prepared a certain way, which is the slow, Southern way that just so happens to be my favorite way with greens as well. These greens in fact were the dark Italian kale I harvested and cooked some weeks back. While they were defrosting, I sauteed a quarter-pound of slab back, roughly chopped, in some olive oil. When all the grease had been rendered, I removed the bacon and sauteed a whole Vidalia onion cut into thin strips. Then I added back the bacon and about seven cups of chopped kale along with a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and let everything cook very slowly in a heavy pot for about 45 minutes to meld all the flavors.

It's a long walk from the kitchen to the terrace. My wife plated the food restaurant-style and we walked the plates out there and had a beautiful meal. Our friend Darren joined us and we topped it off with the German chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and candles. I think Tomeika was pleased.